The most fascinating thing about the movie ‘God is Not Dead’ isn’t the conflict between atheism and Christianity; it’s the tension between narrative and argumentative styles of presentation. The premise for this film is simple enough; an atheist professor demands that his students sign a statement to the effect that God is dead. When a student refuses to do so, the professor commands his to prove that god exists in a series of 3 debates to be held in the first few weeks of class. Failure, it is clear from the outset, will mean an ‘F’ for the class, but the student’s only other option is to sign the statement. This a clash between Christianity and atheism to be sure, but its also a clash that takes the form of a debate, and sort of reasoning that takes place in a debate changes a great deal when it is reframed in narrative form. In God is Not Dead, arguments become a story, and the premises and conclusions of those arguments become events in a storyline.

If the main characters appear as proponents in a debate between a College Professor (Jeffrey Raddison played by Kevin Sorbo) and a college student (Josh Wheaton played by Shane Harper), they are also antagonists in a life or death struggle quite familiar to movie-goers of all faiths and none. Josh is the underdog fighting for his faith; Radisson is a monster who torments his students without mercy. This is David and Goliath to be sure, but this time Goliath wields a grade-book, and David goes to the library. The David and Goliath aspects of the story are not an accident, and the film-makers were clearly trying to make a statement about the treatment of Christians in academia, and the moral vision of these participants overshadows the film’s approach to the debate which is to follow.

The opening scenes of God is Not Dead drive home just how important winning the debate will be to Josh Wheaton. In the event that he loses that debate, Josh will get an ‘F’ in the class, and (as his high-school sweetheart reminds him) that will be the end of long-term career plans. To make matters worse, she regards his willingness to risk his own future as a betrayal of the future they have planned together. She will thus leave him if he goes through with the effort. Josh’s pastor doesn’t help matters much by telling Josh his own actions may be the only exposure his classmates will have to Christianity. So, the stakes are awfully high. Just as David, Josh is fighting not only for his own future, but also for the good of his people (in this case, his classmates). This might seem like a heavy load to put on the shoulders of a college freshmen, but they would be quite familiar to many Christian apologists. This is not just debate over the the truth of a given claim; it is a battle for the souls of all involved.

So, this story about a classroom debate is really a sort of war-story. And of course it will be told in three acts. It should come as no surprise that the villain will be vanquished in the end, though it may come as a surprise just how completely vanquished (and yes, saved) this villain will be.

The first act of the story is largely about Josh’s decision to accept the debate in the first place. His preparations are unimportant, as is the actual argument he produces when the time comes. Josh begins this first round of battle with an argument to the effect that the Big Bang is consistent with, and even requires, the existence of a creator. Radisson simply tells him that according to Stephen Hawking it doesn’t, going on to ask if Josh thinks himself smarter than Hawking. Thus ends the first debate with an outcome that should surprise no-one. What kind of principle villain gets his ass kicked in the First Act of the story? Certainly not this mean-spirited professor!

Still, the first debate does establish a bit more than the fully expected set-back for our underdog Josh. Already, a few patterns begin to emerge from the vision of academic dialogue presented in this film. Both participants rely heavily on appeal to authority, even to the point of simple quote-mining. Both parties will also spend a significant amount of time on science, and in particular the science of cosmogony. The end result is a rather sophomoric vision of philosophy in which the battling heroes themselves pay homage to their own heroes in lieu of exploring the full arguments, all the while coming across as arm-chair scientists rather than participants in a philosophical exchange. To say that this is an impoverished vision of philosophy would be putting it mildly. To say that it is a vision common among Christian apologists would be putting it closer to the point.

In the second debate, Josh returns with a source describing Hawking’s own arguments on the origins of everything as circular. Pressed upon the matter, he reminds Professor Radisson that Hawking himself has suggested that philosophy is dead. Josh goes on to raise familiar concerns about abiogenesis in evolutionary theory. Hawking was of course talking about precisely this sort of second-hand science discussion, but most importantly, playing the anti-philosophical card in this scene raises the dramatic significance of the debate. A humiliated Radisson has little to offer in response, opting instead to mock Wheaton after the other students have left the room. It is an angry confrontation, and in his anger Radisson reveals his greatest weakness. Asked by Josh, what happened to make him so angry, Radisson recounts the story of his own mother’s death and the prayers he offered as a twelve year old in the hopes she would live. This is an interesting speech, because it is one of the few times when the professor is allowed to be something other than a foolish caricature. He ties his own pain in the loss of a loved one to the outrage that some divine plan could ever account for it, and for just a brief moment Radisson seems both eloquent and human.

The final debate is all about the argument from evil, the notion that the existence of God as he is commonly envisioned in Christianity cannot be reconciled with the existence of suffering. Both parties advance arguments on the topic, but the most significant feature of this scene is the increasingly emotional tone of the discussion. Josh can feel the threat to his grade and his ambitions and Radisson can feel the growing threat to his own credibility. Their voices grow louder, and their demeanor more intense. As both parties become increasingly excited, Josh asks Radisson in front of the class to explain why he hates God so much knowing that science supports His existence. In the heat of the moment, Professor Radisson answers Josh in precisely those terms, proclaiming that God took everything from him.

One could chase ugly rabbits down so many holes in this film, but that single response from Professor Radisson really is the core message of the film. It is also the most disturbing thing about the film. For all it’s many simplicities and distortions, God is Not Dead is first and foremost a statement to the effect that atheism is really about hatred of God rather than disbelief.It is a statement that arguments against the existence of God (and counters to arguments in favor of His existence) are simply deceitful rationalizations. The argument from evil is, as this film would have it, less an argument about the (in)consistency of someone’s thoughts about God than an expression of hatred aimed directly at God himself.

In this plot twist, the very topic of debate simply vanishes in front of us, and the story sets all questions of god’s existence aside. Radisson is not really an unbeliever at all; he is a rebellious child (which might help to explain his childish antics). The storyline of the film thus overtakes any effort to address the issues at hand, presenting us with a narrative in which non-believers produce arguments only in the service of venting their own pain. One does not resolve their questions by rational rational argument so much as a kind of spiritual counseling. This counseling is presented still more clearly in one of the films many side-stories, that of a snarky atheist blogger who enjoys poking wholes in religious thought (…hey!). The script-writers must have found it quite amusing to pre-empt a decent portion of their future critics with this particular story-line, but to get back to the point, Amy Ryan (played by Trisha LaFache) learns that she is dying of cancer, a fact which throws quite a curve ball into her life of internet snarketry. When she finds her way backstage at a Christian concert, all of her arguments crumble quite completely as the drummer for the Newsboys suggests that she had actually come to their concert, not to mock them, but so so that they could help her find faith.

…and the subplot ends with a lovely group prayer.

The Newsboys concert fills the final moments of the film with enough exposition to compete with the worst papers from a creative writing workshop. It includes an appearance from Duck Dynasty’s Willie Robertson who cheers on Josh and invites the concert audience to send out a text telling everyone they know that God is Not Dead. This is a message clearly intended to break through the fourth wall and reach into the lives of audience members in the theaters. So I suppose it is no small wonder that evangelical Christians of all shapes and sizes were indeed pushing this film for awhile. I lost track of the number of people who told me that I really should watch the film, assuring me that even non-believers would find it thoughtful and enjoyable. Most seemed quite prepared to concede the one-sidedness of the story-line, even to accept that Sorbo’s character was a bit over the top (it was in fact, well out of earth orbit). What many of those urging this film on others seem unaware of is just how demeaning the story really is for those of us who don’t believe in God. It isn’t just that this film portrays an atheist in an extraordinarily bad light, or even that portrays academia in general as a place filled with cruel and sadistic professors just looking for an excuse to hurt those of faith. What this film does is to empower a dismissiveness that undermines any subsequent dialogue. It encourages believers to think of atheists (and skeptics in general) as people who do not understand our own motivations. It encourages Christian apologists to think of our words as unworthy of consideration, mere diversions from a spiritual tragedy which they understand and we do not.

It is a deeply dehumanizing vision of atheists that this movie presents. For me at least that vision is a conversation-ender; it is not the opening stages of a promising dialogue. As with so much of what passes for Christian apologetics, what is so unfortunate about this film is the degree to which it poisons its own well. In the end, this film does little to engage those of us who don’t share the Christian faith. It never really takes us seriously to begin with, and it never takes seriously the possibilities of dialogue between believers and non-believers.

Its fans should not be surprised to find many of us will respond in kind.

When people introduce a given piece of information as “something you don’t learn in the history books” or “something they don’t teach in history class” I often find myself wondering if the individual in question really has read any history books lately?

…or ever!

…or if they remember their history classes all that clearly.

Rarely, do I get the impression that much thought has gone into this kind of reference, even when I like what follows after. I think these are phrases that just roll off the tongue while someone thinks about what they are going to say next. When I hear what they do say next, as often as not I find myself thinking; “well I teach that,” or even “Hell, that’s right in my textbook!” Sometimes I even find myself thinking; “Every teacher I’ve ever had and every textbook I’ve ever used teach that very thing you numbskull!”

Just kidding; I don’t actually use the word ‘numbskull’ in my internal monologues.

The kind of history-bashing that I am talking about almost always involves old yarns long since unraveled by the majority of historians out there. Just to provide one example, most of the myths about Columbus fall under this heading. I don’t think I’ve ever had a teacher present the classic myth of Columbus discovering America or proving the world is round, at least not without including some form of ironic commentary. I can think of numerous instances where the critique didn’t go far enough, but even my second grade teacher in a conservative lily-white community way back in the 70s made a real effort to debunk some of the standard Columbian themes. My American history textbooks don’t present the classic Columbus myths and my world history textbook even has a small section about the invention of those very myths. Yet, I still hear people preface the most basic critique of Columbus with the notation that we are about to enjoy the thrill of cutting against the pedagogical grain.

I get a little tired of it.

***

This isn’t to say that I don’t have my own complaints about the state of the art in teaching history, and especially about textbooks. It’s a rare day that an encounter with any given survey text doesn’t leave me in tears, or at least put me to sleep, and I regard it as poetic justice that I will forever be teaching introductory classes where these instruments of torture seem to be a staple crop. Every now and then I get to dive into something a little more interesting though, and it’s usually just enough to wet my appetite for more.

..and hate the survey texts just that much more.

The problems that plague survey texts are generally a bit more subtle than Sunday morning historians would have it, however, and those problems are often difficult to resolve without leaving the students a bit shell-shocked. You can cut against the content of the text in classroom discussion, but in doing so a certain number of students always seem to be left behind the critical curve. The inaccuracies of history texts aren’t always due to fundamental misunderstanding; they often seem to be the result of narrative choices, choices often dictated by the nature of survey-text sedatives.

Case in point?

I use a reader for my Native American History class, Major Problems in American Indian History. It contains both primary documents (those produced by actual participants and witnesses in various stages of history) and interpretive essays. One of those essays in this text, “The Dakota Sioux Uprising, 1862″ by Gary Clayton Anderson, presents a wonderful glimpse into the internal conflicts associated with this event. In this article Anderson takes on a terrible event in the history of Indian-white relations, one in which a number of atrocities were committed against non-native civilians, including women and children. If one were of a mind to tell such stories, this event could easily be the classic ‘Indian massacre’ that haunts the background of virtually the entire western genre in both film and literature. The uprising certainly contains enough frightful particulars to transform any narrative into a genuine nightmare. In fact Stan Hoig makes a point to suggest fears of a similar outbreak helped to explain the actions of officials in Colorado during the events prior to Sand Creek.

Note: I said prior to Sand Creek; Chivington and his men are a special kind of evil, but that’s a rant for another day.

In Anderson’s view, the uprising is a complex story in which various factions within the Dakota (otherwise known as Santee Sioux) square off against various factions of outsiders. As hunting became impossible, and rations promised by the U.S. government failed to appear, the prospect of starvation became inextricably mixed with questions about ways of living (farming versus hunting) and relations with outsiders. Some Santee had taken up farming; others wanted to resume (or take up) hunting as a primary means of subsistence. Significantly, many of those who had taken up farming had established connections (even marital relations) with local whites. So, the Santee population included a substantial ‘mixed blood’ population, and the local whites included many who had established ties to the tribe, some of which rose to the level of fictive (adoptive) kin ties.

Without going too much further down this rabbit hole (interesting as it is), Anderson does an excellent job of putting the violence of the outbreak in the context of all these factions. He argues that those perpetuating the violence were trying to pull their own community towards hunting as a way of life while punishing those whites they regarded as responsible for their own situation. Mixed bloods and whites with clear ties to Santee were generally spared (with some Santee going to great lengths to protect such people), and significant factions of the Santee pressed to end the fighting. Rivalries between those pressing the fight (which included a conflict over the question of whether to attack civilians or focus on military targets) and those seeking to end the fighting rose to the scale of potential intra-tribal warfare. Indeed, the actions of Santee opposed to the fighting helped to bring an end to the fighting.

One read through this article, and the simple narratives for this uprising go right out the window.

***

So, what do the survey texts in American History classes have to say about all this? Well let’s look at a couple of them…

Elsewhere in the West, other groups of Indians found themselves caught up in a wider war. An uprising by the Santee Sioux in Minnesota occurred in August of 1862, just as McClellan conceded defeat in the Penninsular campaign in Virginia. Alarmed whites, certain that the uprising was a Confederate plot, ignored legitimate Sioux grievances and responded in kind to Sioux ferocity. In little more than a month 500-800 white settlers and an even greater number of Sioux were killed. Thirty-eight Indians were hanged in a mass execution in Mankado on December 26, 1862, and subsequently all Sioux were expelled from Minnesota. In 1863, U.S. Army Colonel Kit Carson invaded Navajo country in Arizona…

The civil war set in motion a generation of Indian warfare that was more violent and widespread than anything since the 17th century. Herded onto reservations along the Minnesota River by the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux in 1851, the Santee Sioux were angry in the summer of 1862 that annuity payments did not arrive, threatening them with starvation. Young warriors began to speak openly of reclaiming ancestral hunting grounds. Then on August 17, a robbery in which five white settlers were murdered opened the floodgates. The warriors persuaded Chief Little Crow to take them on the warpath, and over the next few weeks at least 500 white Minnesotans were massacred.

Hastily mobilized militia and army units finally suppressed the uprising. A military court convicted 319 Indians of murder and atrocities and sentenced 303 of them to death. Appalled, Lincoln personally reviewed the trial transcripts and reduced the number of executions to 38, the largest act of executive clemency in American history. The government evicted the remaining Sioux from Minnesota to Dakota Territory.

The Indian wars in the West marked the last resistance of a Native American population devastated by disease and demoralized by the removal policy pursued by the federal government. More accurately called ‘settlers’ wars’ (since they began with ‘peaceful settlers,’ often miners, overrunning Native American land, the wars flared up again only a few years after the signing of the Fort Laramie treaty. The Dakota Sioux in Minnesota went to war in 1862. For years, under the leadership of Chief Little Crow, the Dakota, also known as the Santee, had pursued a policy of accommodation, ceding land in return for the promise of annuities. But with his people on the verge of starvation (the local Indian agent told the hungry Dakota, ‘Go and eat grass’), Little Crow reluctantly led his angry warriors in a desperate campaign against the intruders, killing more than 1,000 settlers. American troops quelled what was called the Great Sioux Uprising (also called the Santee Uprising) and marched 1,700 Sioux to Fort Snelling where 400 Indians were put on trial for murder and 38 died in the largest mass execution in American history.

Anyway, that’s three texts. I have a couple more that don’t even mention this event, which is a little disturbing.

***

So, what do we get out of all this?

Well, first, you gotta love the way one book describes the event as the largest use of executive clemency in history and another describes it as the largest mass execution in American history. There is probably an interesting lesson in fact selection there, but the most interesting thing about that little point may well be that both facts seem to be part of the same story.

Ah well, moving on…

The first thing that I would say here is that none of these texts paints the natives in an overtly negative light. These were not written with the intention of slandering the Santee and pleading the cause of manifest destiny after the fact, so to speak. Such narratives do exist, but I didn’t find them in my stack of survey sedatives. If anything, each of these narratives seems almost painfully to be pleading the Sioux’s case and working hard to ensure the reader understand they had their reasons, so to speak.

The distortions here are a little more subtle; most of them being a function of basic story telling technique. Simply put, the question here is one of peopling the story-line. Where Anderson talks about multiple factions in and around the Santee community, each of these authors is telling a story about whites and natives. When they choose to break that down a little, we get references to ‘warriors’ and to Chief Little crow. Gone is the conflict within the tribe between pro-war and pro-peace factions, the entire existence of mixed bloods, arguments about who should and who should not be killed, and especially the active opposition of some villages to participation in the fighting. The decision to spare some whites while killing others is nowhere on the horizon here. And of course the notion that Little Crow simply led his people ‘on the warpath’ (reluctantly or otherwise) simplifies the nature of his leadership as well as the politics of the uprising itself. None of these sub-themes can be worked into the narrative (or even envisioned within it), because the characters are not even in the cast. There is simply no place for them.

So, what do I expect? Pretty much this, actually. These are survey texts, and the authors are struggling here to get a complex story into a paragraph or two. This means simplification, even oversimplification. It seems to me that in each of these cases, the author has made choices based at least partly on the larger narratives in which this story fits. Where Anderson is telling the story of a specific event, each of the survey text authors is treating this as a moment in a larger narrative about Indian-white relations in the west. They identify the participants in the Santee Sioux uprising based on the characters already filling that larger narrative. Thus, we get ‘Indians’ and ‘whites’ and not any of the factions noted above. It’s how survey texts in History are written.

Of course one of the central ironies here is that having put an insufficient number of players on the stage, so to speak, each of the survey authors is then at pains to make understandable the actions of the fictional Santee tribe which has become responsible for these events. Unable to assign specific actions to specific agents in the story, these authors must then work to keep us from walking away with a great big anti-Santee bottom line here. But that bottom line is precisely a function of the narrative decisions they have already made. If we knew more about who was doing what and why, that impression would have no place to creep into the story, but we don’t. We don’t because there is no place for those details in the story. And the survey text ends up being less interesting and less accurate than the more focused story.

Now, just imagine that same kind of trade-off in every paragraph of virtually every page (side-bars excepted) of every history text out there.

So, I am sitting down for the final exam in an upper division course. This was the last of 5 courses on the history of philosophy that I took as an undergraduate; its graded assignments consisted of two essay exams and a research project. My project has already been turned in. All I had to do was manage a few decent essays on this particular phase of intellectual history, and then I could go home and sleep.

I remember the scene rather well actually.

We are sitting around a conference table in a room adjoining the professor’s office, about half a dozen of us, furiously scribbling at our blue-books when the instructor walks into his office. He later emerges with a green apple and a single research paper in one of those plastic binders that teachers hate. (Seriously, I didn’t understand this until I started grading myself. Those are nothing but a pain in the ass.) Anyway, the professor frees the essay from its plastic binder with a slight sneer and takes a bite of the apple.

It is the beginning of a long and dramatic performance.

As I and the others were trying to wax brilliant on this and that subject, I think each of us gradually became aware of a couple things about the professor’s activities at the authoritative end of the table. The first thing I noticed was how thoroughly the professor was eating that apple. The man was truly voracious! I want to say that he ate the core, but that may be 20 years of memory rounding the corners of my original experience. What I can definitely say is that he came damned close to it. Drove me nuts, watching that; I wanted to tell him to stop and give the poor thing a break. It had long since done its duty by normal standards and what was left deserved a good Christian burial in the garbage can. He didn’t even look like he was enjoying the apple goodness all that much. It was just there, and that was apparently an unforgivable crime. I don’t think I have ever felt sorry for a piece of fruit before, but that poor apple had my sympathies.

And the paper?

Well let’s just say the professor couldn’t have put more red ink on that paper if he had opened up the pen and poured it out all over the he pages. I honestly think the prof. was putting down as much material as we were. He did this with grand gestures. You could see him drawing broad circles around some offending bit of text before proceeding with a straight line toward the margins where he then proceeded to write essays of his own, all no doubt about the utter stupidity of the poor paper’s author. That sneer got worse and worse. He shook he head as he wounded the pages of that poor term paper, and I could almost make out some of the cursing under his breath. Contempt oozed off of the prof. and slowly filled the room with a strange and rotten feeling as we struggled to produce our own candidates for the red ink of death.

I forced myself to concentrate on my own essay as I took in the drama happening just off to my left, and I wondered what poor Freshman from his intro class would soon be crying in his red cup full of already-watery beer. What the poor victim had done to earn his feedback-beating, I couldn’t imagine, but I told myself I would be fine. Just keep writing!

Finally, the instructor put down the paper, shook his head, stood up and gave a heavy sigh before walking back into his office and then out into the hall. One of my classmates put down his pen, and sat there a moment, obviously stressed. The guy looked around the room a bit. And we all looked back at him.

“Well, I gotta look.”

After learning he had just received a D- on his research paper, the graduating law-school candidate struggled a bit with his blue-book and eventually turned in his unfinished exam.

I have very few classroom horror stories from my college days. Of course I remember a lot of petty behavior, some arguable decisions, and I witnessed at least one case of genuine abuse to a classmate, …okay two. But it was pretty rare that I personally felt any significant discomfort as a result of anything the teachers did in the classroom.

My statistics textbook took a Hell of a beating, but that’s a different issue. I liked that teacher. I just hated statistics.

But there was one really awful lecture that I remember in detail. Lucky you, dear reader, because I am going to share the misery.

It was my last semester in college and I was finishing up the credits for a second major, linguistics. In those days, the linguistics program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas was interdisciplinary. So, I had taken plenty of classes in linguistic anthropology, sociolingistics, psycholinguistics, logic, philosophy of language, etc. …all really great stuff! I enjoyed every minute of it. But that did leave one really huge gap in the knowledge that a guy graduating with a degree in linguistics ought to have. I hadn’t yet taken a full course in grammar. I didn’t even need it to graduate, at least according to the degree requirements, but that didn’t sit right with me. How could I graduate with a degree in this subject without the benefit of a full course in grammar? I’d heard good things about the lady who taught grammar in the English Department, and so I signed up and prepared to get down and dirty in the realm of syntax.

I knew something was wrong when I found a middle-aged man standing at the head of the classroom on the first day. I do remember his name, but let’s just call him Mr. H. Mr. H. passed out index cards and asked all of us to fill in some personal information while he explained that the usual instructor was on sabbatical that semester. He would be teaching the grammar classes.

Okay.

For the next few minutes everything seemed pretty standard. No red flags went up as Mr. H. reviewed the syllabus, and I felt pretty confident I was going to learn a lot in his class. I grew even more pleased when he explained that he would sometimes venture outside the narrow bounds of grammar to discuss other aspects of language use.

It was as though he had promised to have strippers pass candy out during class.

I couldn’t wait for some of those discussions. Luckily I didn’t have to, as Mr. H. proudly announced his first slightly-off-topic lecture for the semester. He wanted to talk about euphemisms.

I was a happy guy.

He began by telling the story of his first job, working in a mom&pop grocery store somewhere in Texas. Mr. H. talked about the time some yankee had come in and asked for some jalapenos, (pronouncing the ‘j’ about like you would ‘jam’). His reply, as Mr. H. explained it was; “Sir I believe the Spanish call them jalapenos (pronouncing the ‘j’ like the ‘h’ in ham).” He then proceeded to explain that this was a terrible thing to do and that no-one should ever make fun of the way anyone else speaks, ever.

I wasn’t entirely sure that he had described an act of mockery, but that was a detail I could easily overlook. On the main point, the man was preaching to the choir as far as I was concerned. I was really glad I had signed up for the class.

And that’s when things took a bad turn.

Within just a couple minutes of announcing this principle that one shouldn’t make fun of other people’s speech, Mr. H. began to tell us all about the decline of the English language as a result of recent trends. Mr. H. was quite concerned that folks had begun to water the English language down with a variety of euphemisms. It was a terrible situation as our great medium of communication had been harmed a great deal by this trend.

Mr. H. had quite a few examples, but the first one that I can remember was the term ‘African-American’. Mind you, this was 1990 and the battles over political correctness were picking up steam fast. This topic had not yet run its full course in the public sphere; it hadn’t yet bored everyone to tears. My classmates sat on the edge of their seats while Mr. H. proceeded to explain that he had nothing but love for all God’s people, but he didn’t believe in calling people by the wrong word. You had to call people what they were, not what they weren’t. I sat back just a little disappointed and waited for Mr. H. to explain that ‘black’ was the proper name for the people in question.

Instead he proceeded to tell the class that ‘negro’ was what ‘they’ were and that was what folks ought to call them. I sat back up. He had at least surprised me. I had to give him that, but did I hear the man right?

Had I heard correctly. Was he actually skipping right past the common usage to rescue a sordid vocabulary choice out of a distant era? I listened on as Mr. H. insisted that he meant no disrespect by this term and that it had no insulting implications. ‘Negro” was the right word and nothing else would do. Those using the term ‘African-American’ were engaged in a full-scale assault on the English language, and she suffered terribly at their abusive treatment.

The rest of the class ate this message up. I mean they loved it! For my own part, I dropped right out of that choir he was preaching to.

My concern wasn’t entirely with the politics at hand. I was never fully on board with the PC approach to vocabulary, and I could think of reasonable concerns about a lot of the verbal practices at hand. But Mr. H. wasn’t producing reasonable arguments. In fact, he was demonstrating a levelnaïveté that I didn’t expect from someone who was about to teach a class in descriptive linguistics. Objections were crowding their way into my thoughts in such numbers I feared my mind might burst if I listened anymore.

– Mr. H’s assertion that there was a right word for this or any other topic and that anything else was poor use stood out like a sore thumb. By ‘sore thumb, I mean a completely unsupported premise. Worse than that; this assumption flew in the face of pretty much everything lexicographers had to say about the subject. Words had multiple meanings, and topics could be referred to in a variety of different ways. You could argue pros and cons of different word choices, but Mr. H. just insisted there was a right word and the public wasn’t using it anymore. This was a bit like discovering your geography teacher was a flat earther.

– ‘Negro’? Seriously, ‘Negro’?

– Details aside, declensionist narratives about the state of a given language are tired and damned lame. Untold prophets have warned about the decline of English, each with a different sin on their minds, and each cherry-picking the evidence with all the shame of a child stealing fruit from a neighbors tree. In this case, there was the additional absurdity that Mr. H. wanted us to feel for the abuse of the English language even as he minimized concerns about the abuse of actual people. This was personification with an agenda, and that agenda had little room for concerns about folks who really could feel the effects of abuse.

– I really couldn’t square the entire theme of the lecture with the lesson Mr. H. had drawn from his first example. Were we not making fun of the way some folks talked? I suppose he was suggestijng that advocates of politically correct speech were making fun of others, but he had gone well past correcting that and right into the realm of mocking their own vocabulary preferences.

– A bit depends on the presentation, but the notion that words like ‘African American’ are euphemisms contains at least one really ugly implication. If a euphemism is a word that makes something ugly sound better than it is, and that did seem to be the way Mr. H. defined it, then what did that say about his thoughts about the people this term was applied to? Was he not suggesting that the right word really did convey something bad. He denied this of course, but that really seemed to be the station to which his particular train of thought had been headed.

All of these thoughts and others crowded into my head and screamed for me to let them out. I couldn’t believe I was hearing this crap from a guy who studied language for a living.

I looked around and I saw over 20 students falling in love with this man.

It’s okay, I thought. I’m here for the lessons on grammar. This doesn’t have to matter. Who knows. Maybe, Mr. H. will respond well to challenging opinions. Should I say something now and see how he responds? But where to start? I thought about whether or not to field an objection as I just sat there and took in the horror show.

The straw that broke this camels back came when Mr. H. took up the use of the term ‘gay’.

Yep. He was against it.

Mr. H. told us that he would never use that word. He went on to explain that he would never condemn a man for being what God made him, but he believed in calling people what they really were. I thought surely that he was going to tell us the proper term was ‘homosexuals’.

But no.

What these people were, Mr. H. informed us was ‘faggots’.

No other word would do.

And Mr. H.’s fan club fell over themselves to show their appreciation for this point. It was quite the surreal experience for me, watching my classmates nod and stare lovingly at this performance. I thought surely I would soon be sick.

At this point, I felt like Mr. H. had enough rope. If I couldn’t hang him with it, I should at least be able to reign in the message a bit. And anyway, I really needed to see how he would respond to disagreement. So, up went my hand. Mr. H. called on me. And I proceeded to ask him if he didn’t think it more appropriate to consider ‘faggot’ a dysphemism (in retrospect, I should have just said ‘insult’). I went on to ask if he didn’t think the English language was growing new insults at about the same pace that it was growing euphemisms, or if he had specific reasons for thinking the one trend was outpacing the other. I think I managed to keep a respectful tone, but I definitely expressed my disagreement.

And the class grew silent.

The man literally scowled at me. In falling tones, Mr. H. asked me for my name. He then proceeded to dig the pile of index cards from the beginning of class out of his shirt pocket and slowly flip through the until he found mine. He then studied my card for a minute or two, all of this in utter silence. No-one said anything.

With a heavy sigh, Mr. H. finally placed the cards back in his pocket and looked back at me. “What I am truing to say is…” He then proceeded to restate his general thesis that English had been watered down through excessive euphemisms. He did this without responding to any of my points at all. It was amazing. There was no reference to anything I had just said, no answers whatsoever to my questions. No counterarguments. Nothing!

Mr. H. then asked me if that message was okay with me.

After a brief pause, I said ‘yes’.

By ‘yes’ I meant that I would be graduating without the benefit of a full course in grammar.

I recently spent a couple days in Denver, which was a lot of fun while attending a conference at the Community College of Denver on the Auraria campus. CCD shares this campus with two other institutions, Metropolitan State College of Denver and the University of Colorado, Denver. Its a rather unique arrangement which seems to work well for the students.

Highlights of the trip included time spent at the old St. Cajetan’s church, a wonderful presentation by Carlos Fresquez, a Friday evening in Downtown Denver, and seeing the infamous mustang statue at the Denver airport. Sadly, I did not get a picture of this last one, but you just gotta love a statue so Demonic that it killed its maker. …okay maybe not, but it makes a good story anyway.

I can’t believe I didn’t get a picture of that!

So, here I sit in Hotel in Anchorage, waiting to go back home. It can be quite an ordeal getting into or out of the North Slope. I once spent 36 hours in the hands of the airlines, just getting to Santa Fe. A trip to San Antonio once took 24 hours. But the worst experience for me was a 30 hour trip from Vegas to the North Slope with 3 cats in tow. This time, the business office was merciful, and I have a nice layover in a good place …notwithstanding the storm.

I soon shall recover my full Northosity!

(If you click on the pics, they will embiggen.)

Mount Rainier
(had another layover in Seattle)

St. Cajetans, founded in 1925

Arts and Crafts stands

Random Artwork

Part of a mural on campus (I literally couldn’t get far enough back to catch the whole thing in my lens.)

More Campus Artwork

Still More Campus Artwork

The view from inside the Student Union (which was at one time a brewery)

How do you adapt course material to the cultural context of a tribal college? I have had enough conversations about that topic in the last couple days to last me a little while. Whether any of them will help or not is of course an open question, but for the moment, I have a little time to reflect on the matter.

It feels like I am never on the same page with others when the topic comes up. Most of the cultural materials I have seen have been saturated with over-extended metaphors, clunky diagrams with over-simplified cultural motifs all over them, and deep philosophical discussions on the English gloss of some native term. When such materials show up, I always feel some trepidation.When such materials show up, I can’t help but want to step outside and get a breath of fresh air.

It’s no big deal, really. I get that feeling in most meetings sooner or later. Why should those aimed at indigenizing education be any different!

But seriously, before moving on I suppose I should say that my ‘exhibit A’ for how not to to an indigenous educational policy would be Diné Educational Philosophy, at least as it was taught when I was at Diné College. At the heart of this policy was a grand metaphor in which call lessons could be divided into four stages of learning, each of which corresponded to four stages of life development, which in turn corresponded to the four cardinal directions, and from there the metaphors multiplied as various aspects of Navajo cosmology could be mapped onto this four-part division. I should say that the whole thing always fascinated me, and there are a lot of interesting details about it that just are not going to make it into this blog piece. In practice, it was an awful clunky system.

Mind you, it was college policy that all classes had to incorporate a methodology based on this metaphor into each of our classes. New full-time instructors took classes in the subject (unless it conflicted with our schedules) and part-time instructors had a training day on it (or at least they were supposed to). So what most of us did was to draw a circle on the board, divide it into a four-piece pie, attach the requisite metaphors, and get on with what we would have been doing anyway. To say that this paint-by-numbers approach to an indigenous education was less than helpful would be putting it mildly. As often as not, it was the more “traditional” students who were displeased to see one of those circles go up on the board at the beginning of a lesson.

So, leaving my past frustrations aside, how would I prefer to approach this? I’m still relatively new to the North slope, so my learning curve is still pretty steep. And tonight, I think I may have just had a mini epiphany, the kind that advances the process for me. It came while reading the blog, “Stop and Smell the Lichen,” written by Rainey Hopson, a woman living in Anaktuvuk pass.

A wonderful piece entitled, “A Good Person,” had the following observations about how one judges character in a small village:

In the village you know everyone, and everyone knows you. You know their secrets and their deeds of kindness. You know wether they are kind to the elder that needed help walking on slippery ice. You know every mean word that they ever said. You know the bad as well as the good. You always act as politely as you can, because you know you will have to deal with this person for the rest of your life, wether you like them or not. You know, after years of interaction and observing a persons actions wether they are good or not, wether you can trust them for certain things, wether or not this person speaks with authority and knowledge. We see each other as permanent beings in our life, and the job and the money and the physical objects as fleeting insubstantial things. A very different view. A different set of scales.”

There is a lot to think about in this piece, but what turned my head back to the subject of adapting lessons to the cultural context of teaching native students was the realization that this is a critical difference between the great city of Barrow (with its enormous population of around 4,000 people) and the smaller villages with populations in the low hundreds.

To someone living in a modern city, much less a metropolitan center, the difference must seem negligible. Living in a town of four thousand and isolated from any major cities by hundreds of miles of tundra must seem to pose many of the same challenges as living in one with a few hundred people. But there are critical differences.

Barrow does have a small town feel. But here it is still possible, even for long-time residents, to see people one does not yet know, or to choose whether one wishes to deal with at least some people. If the population is small, it is not so small as to render relationships entirely inevitable as the village relationships Mrs. Hopson describes in the passage above. Small wonder that our “village students” often seem to have trouble adapting to life in the big city of Barrow, or (more to the point, perhaps) to life away from home.

Thinking about this, I made a small connection to just one lesson in one of the classes that I teach, an introductory course on cultural anthropology. What part of my anthropology class did I connect to this piece? Well life in the Amazonian rainforest of course.My textbook for that class contains an extensive discussion of the limits of leadership by personal credibility. When leaders lack coercive authority, the ability to influence others depends on the ability to form direct personal relationships with them. Some anthropologists have attempted to put a number on the possibilities, an objective limit to the number of people whose actions you can guide without the ability to issue an order, point to a rule, or hand out a set punishment.

What is the magic number? Pssh! Don’t believe everything I tell you!

…Okay, if you insist. To say this is an oversimplification is an an understatement dipped in some damned weak sauce, but anyway, the limit is somewhere in the low hundreds.

It occurred to me that the difference between the smaller villages and Barrow falls somewhere in the vicinity of that same set of limitations. Whatever the number in question, the point is that there is some point at which a population becomes too big to ensure significant personal interactions with someone in any given household, and THAT means real differences in the social organization of the community. What Rainey Hopson described in her blog is a quality of social life that is present in the smaller of the North Slope. If the Amazonian specialists covered in my anthropology texts are to be believed, it also exists (or existed) in a number of Amazonian societies.

So, in reading Mrs. Hopson’s blog I had a little ‘aha!’ moment about a connection between something my students have not experienced at all (life in an Amazonian village) and something they with which they will most likely have some familiarity. Even those students who have not lived in the villages will likely be familiar with the difference. They will know there is a difference, and those that have lived here all their lives will have formed ideas about that difference. This means that I can use the comparison as a jumping off point for exploring a range of related issues. I can now use the bridge between these topics as a means of helping students understand he foreign topics of Amazonian villagers and in turn use the study of those Amazonian villages as a jumping off point for discussions of local living conditions.

So, now I have a link between something I will teach at least once a year (and the truth is it will come up in other classes). The question is what to do with it? Some might view this as an opportunity to create a lesson plan, some set exercise in which students will be invited to meditate on the linkage. And such a lesson may or may not be a good thing. To me, however, that is not really the point.

For myself, I will address this point in as many different ways as I can in my different classes, asking students a variety of questions, and working to see just how far I can push the connection, just how much it can explain, and where else might the topic lea.

The point is that I need more moments like that, more links between the familiar pieces of life here on the North Slope, and various strange topics that I cover in my classes (many of which are as foreign to my life experiences as to those of my students).

And that is where my revulsion at so much prefabricated cultural literacy comes in. It is a simple question of where you want to put your effort. If I’m a new teacher, just in from off-slope, I don’t need an exercise or a diagram that will draw this connection for me. …one that I can use in my classroom with or without understanding the point at hand myself. I don’t need a master mataphore in which to plug all my regular lessons. What I need to help me do my job is a venue wherein I can learn as much as possible about life here in this area, where I can talk to people from the local communities about things relevant to my teaching responsibilities. What I need is something that helps me form personal relationships with the right folks, learn the right information from them, and put that information into practice in my courses.

And here is where so many educators in this area miss the boat, because it is simply easier (and perhaps more effective when dealing with accreditation agencies) to produce formulaic educational materials than it is to build learning environments. It is easier to dictate cultural content to instructors than it is to facilitate learning that will enable an educator to draw connections between their subject and the cultural environment in which they work.

This is how I actually approached my classes at Diné College, and it is how I hope to approach them here; learning as much as I can about the cultural setting and engaging my native students in dialogue about the issues that affect their lives here.

If circles go on the board, hopefully, it won’t be because they have become a procedural requirement.

Note: The photo is a picture of the village of Wainwright, AK. The Anthropology text mentioned above is John H. Bodley. Cultural Anthropology: Tribes, States, and the Global System. Fourth Edition. (Boston: McGraw Hill) 2005. Rainey Hopson’s blog is called; “Stop and Smell the Lichen.”